


Now I'm Thinking Maybe

by VincentTheChild



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Minor Character Death, One-Sided Attraction, One-sided Newton Geiszler/Hermann Gottlieb
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-23
Updated: 2013-10-23
Packaged: 2017-12-30 05:30:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,350
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1014708
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VincentTheChild/pseuds/VincentTheChild
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Soul-mates. Something deeper than true love and something deeper than a lifelong friendship, something stronger than blood. Something unbreakable, no matter what happened. Soul mate would do. It was all the world and still not enough and it would do because Newton would never have more.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Now I'm Thinking Maybe

**Author's Note:**

> This is my very first Pacific Rim fanfiction ever, though not my first fanfiction ever written and I hope that you all enjoy. Fair warning, this piece is very sad. I cried writing it. So I hope that, while sad, this piece is of some enjoyment to you. I would suggest reading this while listening to the song "Closer" by The Tiny. The lyrics held within the piece and the inspiration for the piece both come from this song. Please feel free to comment. All feedback, positive or negative, is appreciated. Thank you.

_Now I’m thinking maybe I was stoned_

Their friendship was not a practical one. Newton knew, everyone knew that the only thing that kept them from launching themselves across the room and ripping each other’s throats out through an eye socket was the fact that they had been through so much together that to not be friends would have been more detrimental to themselves than all the fights they had had and no doubt would have in their lifetimes. They knew that no matter how hard they pushed, no matter how loud they screamed, no matter how bloody their arguments got, they could never stop being friends. It would break them both and Newton knew this. He knew this better than all of them.

After drifting together with Hermann into the kaiju brain, he knew that no matter what happened then, there was something between the two of them that couldn’t be broken off, something that had been building for years and was just now surfacing. The only way Newt knew how to describe it was soul-mate. Of course he didn’t mean it in the romantic sense, just that they were somehow woven together at their core, the kind of people that were truly inseparable no matter what, the kind of people that most of the world population would never have a chance of being. Soul-mates. Something deeper than true love and something deeper than a lifelong friendship, something stronger than blood.

Something unbreakable, no matter what happened. No matter what happened.

_I felt my feet lift off the ground_

It wasn’t until months, almost two years after they drifted that Newton started to see Hermann in a different light. It wasn’t anything drastic, really, just little things that started to surface that the biologist had never thought about. The first thing he noticed was Hermann’s cheekbones. Honestly, it scared the daylights out of Newt when he realized he was admiring his best friend’s cheekbones from across the dinner table when he had been invited over by Hermann and his wife for dinner like he was every Thursday. It seriously freaked him out so much that he excused himself for a moment under the pretense of needing to use the bathroom, then once he had locked the door to the bathroom, he had slumped against the wall and had a small and silent freak out on the tile floor.

It took a shockingly short time for Newt to convince himself that it was just him admiring a friend. He was allowed to admire a friend, wasn’t he? After all, straight girls told each other they were hot all the time and he and some of his (very few) guy friends complimented each other’s ink. He was totally allowed to think Hermann’s cheekbones were the most attractive cheekbones in the freaking world if he wanted to because Hermann was his best friend and nothing would change that.

Nothing would change that.

_And my heart was screaming at my bones._

It wasn’t until almost a month and a half later that Newt started to like looking at Hermann’s hands. They were long fingered, elegant hands that had terrible mathematician’s handwriting, but could play the piano with such grace. Newton had been privy a few times to Hermann playing the piano when he had gone over to Hermann’s new home in London to sit with Hermann’s wife and kid and just hang out. When the mathematician was feeling rather free-spirited or at ease, he would sometimes hobble over to the piano and begin to play some soft melody that reminded Newt of rain in the spring and the first moments of dawn. Hermann’s hands made any random cluster of notes turn into a beautiful masterpiece.

_I need you closer_

One day Newton came in when Hermann was alone in the house, playing the piano and he walked into the room, resting against the doorjamb with his hands in his pockets, at ease while listening to Hermann play some gentle classic melody that Newt would never be able to name and yet would never forget because his friend had played it with those hands. Sometime after Hermann realized Newton’s presence, he explained that music is like math, but something a little better. Numbers were concrete, they didn’t lie. Notes on a page were concrete in the same manner, but at the same time could never be solidified because of the element of human emotion put into them. After a long moment of playing, he had lowered his head some, Newton still standing a decent distance behind him.

“I lied before, Newton,” he said to the biologist. “Numbers are not the closest thing we have to the handwriting of God. Numbers are too monotone when put into human hands. Music has what the numbers lack: emotion.”

And that was when Newton began to notice Hermann’s intellect on more than just a professional scale.

_As he's in the middle of the street, then I pretend he is mine to keep_

Newton finally breaks down one day, five years after they have drifted and he can’t go a day without thinking about or calling or seeing Hermann, whether he’s there or not. The biologist is in a lab, having been granted the ability and funding to continue his research because if one thing exists that can destroy the world, another thing might also. He’s in his lab when it finally hits, him. Hermann, in his mind, was no longer a soul mate in the idea of a friend.

“Oh my-” Newt nearly chokes as the world around him begins to collapse and he suddenly feels as though an entire Jaeger has been dropped onto his shoulders. He has to grab onto his lab table for support before his legs give out and he crumples onto the floor in a mess, halfway between hysterical and having a panic attack. He recalls hearing whispered profanities and vaguely realizing that he’s the one saying them, hyperventilating on the floor of a science lab surrounded by Kaiju guts and samples. 

It takes him fifteen minutes to calm down enough where he doesn’t feel like he’s going to pass out and he has the foreboding feeling that he’s just gone underwater and is drowning. And somehow, he knows he will never resurface.

_Cars are running fast on both sides of his head. His eyes say: Closer closer closer_

Newton tries to hide. He tries to disappear, even contemplates getting on a plane to anywhere but where he was and never coming back, but then he thinks of Hermann and the few times he’s smiled, truly smiled, and the way the light shines off his eyes and how his shoes are always polished and Newton just loses all will to leave. So he does all that he can do: he endures. He goes to Thursday dinners and sees Hermann be the happiest man alive with a wife he adores more than life and a child he would rather give up the air in his lungs for than lose. There’s a part of Newton that wonders, even if it’s just for a moment, what things might have been like had he been a woman, rather than a man. He wonders for a moment what things might have been like if Hermann’s wife never existed. He wonders if then things might have been different.

He wants to say something to Hermann, just because Hermann has the right to know. Hermann should know that his best friend has come to be something else entirely from when they started. He’s tried to tell the mathematician on more than one occasion, but the words always get stuck in his throat and he always ends up saying something other than what he had intended. 

_I met him when the sun was down. The bar was closed. We both have had no sleep._

Newton wishes that things could go back to how they were, back to before he became a permanent fixture in the Gottlieb household on Thursday nights and most afternoons when Hermann would get done teaching at the University. He wishes that it could return to when he and Hermann would fight almost as much as they breathed, to when they were constantly on the brink of killing each other just for a moment of peace, because even though they were about to die and their world was about to be subject to the apocalypse, trying to save the world was a lot less complicated than trying to forget he loved Hermann Gottlieb more than he loved anything. And it became even more complicated when Hermann lost everything.

It had been an accident. Hermann’s daughter had been at a community theatre practice and his wife had gone to pick her up. It was late, almost ten in the evening, but it wasn’t a long drive and it was a safe town, so there was no reason to worry. Only they could have never known that that one night was the night one of the drivers in the oncoming lane would have a seizure while driving. They could have never known that it would cause Mrs. Gottlieb’s car, both her and her eleven year old daughter inside, to roll onto it’s side and be pushed into a telephone pole. There was no way they could have known. There was no way they could have stopped it.

And Hermann Gottlieb, who had survived Kaiju attacks, Newton as a lab partner, and drifting with the most dangerous species known to man, fell apart in the hospital after hearing that his wife and daughter never woke up. Newton had been there and caught Hermann in his arms as the man dropped his cane and collapsed like a marionette with its strings cut. Newton sat there on the hospital floor with his best friend, keeping the man held together enough to get him home before Hermann shattered into a million pieces and curled up on his daughter’s bed with his wife’s wedding ring clutched in his hands. Newton stayed on the other end of the house, feeling like some sort of peeping tom and feeling sick at himself for having ever wished that Hermann’s wife had never existed.

_My face beneath the street lamp, it reveals what it is lonely people seek_

Hermann didn’t do anything for a long while after that. Newton still came every day when he got done with work, still had dinner with him on Thursdays, only now it usually consisted of take-out or they would go out to a restaurant when Newt could talk Hermann into it. But he wasn’t the same. He was a little less happy, a little more broken, but healing as best he could. Newton hated himself and cried some nights because, even now, he was horribly jealous of Hermann’s wife. While he knew that he and Hermann were soul mates, were inexplicably woven together by fate and that if Newt were to die now Hermann would miss him, he also knew that he would not be missed in the same way Hermann would miss his wife. Hermann would never miss the warmth of Newton’s body in the bed beside him, would never miss the feeling of Newton kissing him goodnight, would never miss the life of them together with a child in a picket fence life.

And the worst part was that Hermann knew, even before Newt got the chance to say anything. They were walking home one night from dinner - it had been Newt’s treat - and Hermann suddenly stopped on the sidewalk.

“Newton,” he had said in his very matter-of-fact way that he addressed everything he thought was of great importance with. “I have something to say and I would thank you if you wouldn’t laugh or jump to conclusions before I finish.”

Newton, who had turned so that they were now facing, nodded slowly, a knot forming in his stomach and he got the feeling that he was sinking even deeper than he was before.

“Newton, I have considered us for a long time to be soul mates of a sort,” Hermann started, never losing that matter-of-fact tone. “Not in the overly popular idea of romance, but rather that you and I are somehow bound together by some force that no matter how hard we try, neither of us can escape.” Hermann tapped his cane on the ground and looked Newton square in the eye. “You are my deepest friend, Newton, and I want you to know that nothing will ever change that, no tragedy, no mishap, no misunderstandings, nor anything will stop me from caring for you as my truly deepest friend.”

Newton somehow knew that this wasn’t just Herm being sentimental. Hermann knew, and looking back, Hermann must have always known, maybe even before Newton did. Hermann was always smart like that.

“And I hope that never changes,” the mathematician adds a little more softly. “I would not trade you as my friend for the world.”

Newton expects that to sting. He expects it to hurt as if he has been slapped across the face or that he will feel like they say in the stories, like his heart has been ripped out, but he doesn’t. His chest constricts some, a little painfully, but he smiles all the same and offers Hermann his arm to hold onto while they hobble back to Hermann’s house.

“I wouldn’t either, man,” Newton says. And he wouldn’t, because at this point, attempting to be anything more would mean losing Hermann in the only way he could have him.

Yes, best friend would do. Soul mate would do. It was all the world and still not enough and it would do because Newton would never have more. After all, to not be friends would be more detrimental to themselves than all the fights they had had and no doubt would have in their lifetimes.  
And you're close enough to lose

_Close to the point, to where you know that your mind,_

_it cannot choose_

_Close enough to lose._

_Close enough to lose_

_your heart…_

**Author's Note:**

> Please feel free to comment.
> 
> Lyrics are from the song "Closer" by The Tiny.


End file.
